Mainlining Christmas

Let me start by saying that we went into this not expecting much. We knew it was a Vince Vaughn vehicle about Santa’s brother, and that much made us wince. But it was time, so we put in the DVD, and were amazed at what we found. This movie is actually good. Not just good: in the scale of Christmas comedies it’s kinda…. great. But let me give you a few more caveats: There are bad, distracting, “zany” sound effects. They are a terrible choice. But except for a few scenes, they’re easy to ignore. Similarly: slapstick. The movie could have done with about 50% less slapstick. There are a few aspects that would be annoying if we had certain meta-knowledge. Who is playing this or that small role, for example. But we didn’t know, so it was just a small, somewhat amusing role. This movie is not exactly kind to its women. The female characters are almost entirely eye candy or shrewish or both. It could have been much worse, and it is possible to look past the jokes to see that there

As a fan of Dashiell Hammett I was excited to see The Thin Man on a list of movies set at Christmas. It’s always been one of those eventually-I’ll-get-to-it kind of movies. The movie is lighter in tone than the book, which in turn is already one of Hammett's lighter works. So this is less noir than it is comedy-mystery. The Thin Man focuses on Nick and Nora Charles. He’s a former detective, she’s an heiress, they’re in New York for the holidays to look up old friends and throw lavish parties. One of Nick’s former clients goes missing, then the bodies start piling up, and before you know it everyone from the daughter to the cops are asking for his help looking into the case. Nora thinks it’s terribly exciting, and happily says so. To put it shortly: I loved this. I loved the banter between the main characters. I loved the dialogue, the lighting, the film's style and the setting. I loved the holiday party with gangsters rubbing elbows with cops and reporters and everyone

Love Actually is to romantic comedies what absinthe is to spirits. It represents the essence of a genre distilled to a point where it no longer tastes likes a romantic comedy, but even in small doses will still mess with your head. For better and for worse, Love Actually does not come packaged in small doses. This clocks in at around two hours and fifteen minutes. While I did enjoy the movie on this viewing, I would have thanked its editor for amputating forty-five minutes of that. I say "this viewing," because this is the second time I saw the film. I didn't care for it much after the first, though I slid it into that rare category of movies I didn't like but thought were quite good. I was actually someone distressed to find myself enjoying it this time, as I like having a handful of movies fitting that description I can whip out in conversation. Love Actually is about love. The theme is "love." The plot is "love." The characters are a

This is the first and only episode of The Fairly OddParents I've seen. The premise of the series is that the main character has a pair of fairy god-parents who grant his wishes, leading to mayhem. I have a hard time imagining how the producers have been able to wring nine seasons out of this premise, but I have to admit I found this special inventive and fun. The episode starts right before Christmas, Timmy's favorite day of the year. There's some generic toon chaos involving his babysitter (apparently, she was the regular villain at this point, so they shoehorned her into the episode), followed by Christmas itself. At the end of the day, Timmy makes the classic wish: for every day to be Christmas. The next few minutes are pretty predictable: the quality of each successive Christmas diminishes, and the world grows more and more irritated at the now seemingly eternal holiday. It takes Timmy a while to catch on, and by that time things are really bad. The military'

Earlier this season I stumbled upon a list of ‘alternative christmas movies’. As I expected, some of them we’d seen, and a few others were already on our list, but there were a couple films that had flown under our radar so far, either because we didn’t realize they were set at Christmas, or didn’t think that would be enough to qualify them as fodder for this project. This is one we’d never even heard of. Bell, Book and Candle is set at Christmas, all right, and Christmas and snow, decorations and music are enough of the setting to merit it a place here, but it’s so much more. This movie is about witches in New York. Kim Novak plays a witch who decides to seduce the guy upstairs (Jimmy Stewart) away from another woman with the help of a little magic and the assistance of her cat. Her friends in the magic community both help and hinder her as the relationship goes on. The movie has ups and downs: a few comedy bits with odd sound effect choices, a sequence or two that’s poorly p

It's strange that it took me so long to see The Ref . It's relatively well known, but somehow it always slipped below my radar. But it finally came up on my Netflix queue. The plot revolves around a thief who takes a dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas Eve to hide out from the cops. By and large, comedies about families with issues are just about the worst genre holiday entertainment has to offer, but miraculously, The Ref is actually pretty good. While there's a long list of things this movie did wrong, the filmmakers made several extremely smart decisions that elevate this to something worth watching. First of all, they cut the slapstick down to a minimum. Second - and maybe more important - they wrote some depth into the main characters. If the husband and wife had been two-dimensional, this thing would probably have been as bad as Surviving Christmas . Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point. Fortunately, the husband and wife were well cast (Judy D

This is a neat little book. It does a good job simultaneously existing as a children's book and a mock-children's book, which isn't an easy feat. We wound up getting this as a Christmas present from my parents, which was a good guess on their part: we'd been wanting to track it down for a while. The story is about a Hanukkah latke who's made, then winds up running around in pain and frustration, in part because of the boiling oil he was initially cooked in, but also because he can't find a place where he belongs in a world built around Christmas. The humor is sharp and dark, but not quite as dark as you might expect. Like Roald Dahl, Snicket has a good sense of what kids find funny and adults find horrific, and he exploits that line proficiently. Depending on the reader's tone of voice, this could easily be read as a silly storybook to a young kid or dark satire to an older crowd. The story works metaphorically for the sense of alienation felt by Jewis

Whoa. WHOA. We just watched the epitome of stop-motion Christmas specials. I know, I know, you don’t believe me yet. Just give me a minute. You know Rudolph , and Frosty , and Rudolph’s Shiny New Year , and Frosty’s Winter Wonderland , and Santa Claus is Coming to Town , and The Year Without a Santa Claus . But did you know that every last one of these takes place in a vast shared universe, which involves still more epic figures deserving of winter myth-making? No? Then you haven’t seen this one. For me, Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July retroactively improves all the specials that came before it. The premise is straightforward on the surface. An evil wizard who used to rule the Arctic wants to destroy Santa’s hold on winter, and to do so, he decides to take down Rudolph, using his friendship with Frosty as a lever against the young reindeer. Oh, and we happen to establish the source and purpose of Rudolph’s magic, which I don’t want to spoil for you. What? You d

This was highly ranked on a list over at Rotten Tomatoes , so I decided to check it out. It's a Christmas war movie, which seems to be a fairly sparse sub-genre, especially when compared to the almost absurdly large Christmas action movie genre. It's a stark and fascinating film, at times sad, beautiful, and funny. It's got some issues which hold it back from being a bona fide classic, but it's still worth watching. The movie follows a unit of "whiz kid" soldiers in World War II who are sent to gather intelligence. When the movie opens, half of their unit is already dead and most of the rest are sick of combat. Every synopsis I've seen focuses on the movie's second act, when they have a series of bizarre encounters with a German squad culminating in a Christmas celebration. There's some good film making on display here. These scenes are tense, funny, and engaging. Gradually, we learn the Germans want to surrender, but there are some complicat

This is the DVD cover, because the movie poster is silly and misleading. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the sixth James Bond movie, based on the tenth James Bond book. It’s a quieter movie than a lot of the others, it follows Bond’s relationship with one woman, Tracy, and an unaffiliated mission to track down Blofeld. This is the only movie starring George Lazenby as Bond, and there are a couple internal nods to the fact that this is the same character with a different actor. The romance between Tracy and Bond is fairly poignant, if occasionally as over-the-top as the rest of the movie. The action plot revolves around Bond posing as a genealogist to infiltrate Blofeld’s stronghold in the Alps. Blofeld has a fairly silly plot to use a bunch of hypnotised young women to damage the world’s food supplies (this made slightly more sense in the book), but the important thing for our purposes is that it’s Christmas! So there is a ski chase which is sometimes very exciting and someti

We've been watching Shane Black movies all month in preparation for this: the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film set at Christmas. I'm reviewing the movie itself over at The Middle Room , but I had some thoughts that felt more at home here. While I'm grateful it lets me talk about the movie here, the holiday backdrop actually seemed a little superfluous to me. The setting was peppered with yuletide references, and there was no shortage of jokes reminding us when the events were occurring. But ultimately, I'm not sure what these accomplished (besides being good for a laugh). I guess there's a case to be made for tone, but I didn't feel the disconnect I got from Die Hard or melodramatic juxtaposition from Lethal Weapon. The fact it was set in winter allowed them to shoot Tony dragging his broken armor through the snow (in Tennessee - in December: something's off here), but not much else. If anything, it almost felt like the movie was set at Christmas to

"Chapter Two: The Lady in the Lake." "Chapter Three: The Little Sister."  If you're already intrigued, then you'll probably like this movie the way I do. If you're here, you probably realize that Erin and I are rather fond of Christmas, or at least Christmassy things. You've probably picked up that we both enjoy fantasy and science fiction. You may not know that I'm also a huge fan of noir. So a noir-themed dark comedy set at Christmas? Yes, please! Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has a fairly amusing pedigree. It's known as the movie that restarted Robert Downey Jr's career. It's one of Shane Black's films, so like several others, it takes place at Christmas. The title comes from European slang description for James Bond movies. And as alluded to above, all the chapter titles within the movie come from Raymond Chandler. It’s either a noir-style mystery-thriller that is also really funny, or the kind of loving parody that fully embrac

I loved this movie when I was in high school, but - despite having a copy - I haven't actually sat down and watched it in years. I'd more or less forgotten it was set at Christmas until I saw it on a list of holiday movies. I figured it would be cheating to count this as a "Christmas movie" and decided it would be a good time to re-watch it. Turns out I was wrong about it being a stretch: the holiday elements permeate the setting, tone, and music of the film. This is definitely a Christmas movie, and a fantastic one at that. The Long Kiss Goodnight is directed by Renny Harlin, better known for Die Hard 2. The writing is credited to Shane Black (hence the Christmas setting, I suppose), though Wikipedia mentions there was some script-doctoring involved. The movie is, among other things, absurd and implausible: if you can't suspend your disbelief, don't bother putting it on. But it's clearly not intended to be realistic. This is unapologetically pul

You knew we were going to get to these eventually. They’ve actually been on the list since the beginning, we have them on DVD, but we kept holding off on them, keeping Doctor Who as a sort of fallback option for when we ran out of other stuff or got too tired of terrible things. And then that didn’t happen. So one day last week we just decided to finally re-watch these. Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion (2005) I have very fond memories of the first time I watched this episode. It introduced David Tennant’s Doctor and I loved it. I loved it a little less on this viewing. The murderous robot Santas and trees are still fun, but a lot of this hour is humans being whiny. Whenever Tennant is on it really picks up, but there’s a big boring chunk in the middle without him. The writers were still sort of trying things out with Ten at this point; his character doesn’t solidify for a bit, and that adds to the surreality of watching this episode. Plus the end with Harriet Jones is kinda nas

This is only the second episode of Tales From the Crypt produced, and it was directed by Robert Zemeckis (keep in mind this is Zemeckis in '89, back when he making the Back to the Future movies and still awesome; not the current Zemeckis who's been producing CG abominations). I saw a handful of episodes of Tales From the Crypt back in the day, but I certainly never watched religiously. Actually, I suspect I would have watched it religiously had I been able to, but I never had HBO growing up (this also means the episodes I did get to see were tragically edited for content). Lindsay tracked this down on Youtube, and we just finished watching it. I'm really, really glad we did: it was a lot of fun. The episode starts with a woman brutally murdering her husband for the insurance money while her daughter's asleep. When she tries to dispose of the body, an ax murderer dressed as Santa Claus shows up. As you can probably tell, there's not much in the way of plot here.

We held off on this one for a few years, because it kind of felt like cheating. But, when you look at it, Christmas permeates Die Hard a hell of lot more thoroughly than it does Holiday Inn. There's a lot of Christmas woven into Die Hard's soundtrack. Along with the background of the Christmas party and the (brilliant) elevator sequence, it gives the entire film a holiday feel. Beyond that, Die Hard is arguably the quintessential action movie. At the very least, it's the quintessential action movie of its generation, and it could easily be the best action ever made. It's been a few years since I last watched it, and it holds up marvelously. Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman are both amazing in their respective roles as the ultimate cop and robber, and they've got great material to work with, thanks to some fantastic writing and directing. Decades of knock-offs would follow this, but none would figure out what made Die Hard work as well as it did. There'

Batman: The Brave and the Bold isn’t just a mouthful to say, it was quite a fun show. I really liked the crazy balance they tried between darker plotlines and zany villains, with both real emotion and corny dialogue. It’s a take on Batman that I really like, casting him as stoic and determined, maybe a little too serious, the guy who all the young heroes look up to, and the older heroes are jealous of. This episode (after the cold opening with Blue Beetle helping take down Sportsmaster) focuses on Red Tornado’s desire to feel some Christmas spirit. Since I’ve gotten used to the version of Red Tornado in Young Justice, it was a bit surreal to watch this now, but I got into it pretty quickly. I really liked the subtle musical allusions to A Charlie Brown Christmas at the beginning of the episode. Batman’s flashbacks (now Christmas-related) are a bit on the melodramatic side, but not terrible. Red Tornado and Batman are up against Fun Haus, who seems to be a villain unique to BATB,

As White Christmas opens, the film proudly announces that it was produced in VistaVision, which research tells me means that it was filmed in a special widescreen process that gave exceptionally high resolution for its time. While the Netflix version that we watched occasionally lost some of that gorgeous resolution, the care and artistry that went into this picture was still very apparent. The plot is simple on the surface: Burl Ives and Danny Kaye play a pair of friends and showbiz business partners who fall for a pair of sisters who are a singing duo. On that level, it seems similar to Holiday Inn, the classic holiday musical which White Christmas (the song) originated in. But the experience here is miles above the earlier film. For starters, all the characters are actually characters. The pair of guys are army buddies as well as business partners and that affects the plot throughout. The secondary romantic pair make it their business to get the primary pair together, and it

Hey, Christmas is even in the title! This totally counts! I love Nature. Even if you don’t, I recommend you watch the first part of this. It has one of my favorite scenes that has ever been on Nature or any other nature program, ever. It’s the part with the fox. I love it. I’m not going to tell you more. The rest of the program is great too. It follows animals searching for food and shelter in Yellowstone National Park in the dead of winter. Bison, elk, wolves, bears, birds, otters and humans all make appearances. I was actually surprised how much I liked following the photographer Tom Murphy as he showed how he camps out in the snow, both to get amazing photos and just because he loves the area. The scene with the people who came out with telescopes to look for wildlife on Christmas day was pretty fantastic as well. The narration tips over the edge into pretentious once or twice. By and large I’m willing to overlook silly narration in a good documentary, but the bit about the

Phineas and Ferb's second Christmas special was quite a bit smaller and less ambitious than their first. I also liked it quite a bit more. This is essentially a half-episode, which is a format the series is used to: most Phineas and Ferb episodes are broken into two unconnected 11 minute shorts. This differs from the norm in that it's a standalone: there's no "second short" following it. My guess is it was produced to be aired along with the much longer special from the prior year (with commercials, they should fill out an hour together). The plot to this episode is intentionally thin: the boys are putting on an old fashioned Christmas TV special in the middle of summer. While this ostensibly uses the show's normal formula, it doesn't really commit to it. The sequences with Perry and Doofenshmirtz are far shorter, and Candace's attempt to bust Phineas and Ferb is tacked on. I don't think this is a problem: in fact, it demonstrates the writers